Sustainable ecological economies

A brief accounting is presented of the evolution of natural ecosystems and human cultures including industrialization and its ecologically-significant interactions with natural abiotic and biotic processes of the earth. These accounts show, among other things, that excess resource harvest rates and material releases into the natural environment have been ecological risks of growing scope and scale throughout the history of political economies. The growing ecological risks of industrialization are attributed to disparities between the rates and directions of evolution in the ecological features of process and structure of corporate and political economies relative to the rates and directions of evolution in their cultural institutions of control. Many social and political organizations are now calling for adaptations toward sustainable industrialization by promoting evolution in the cultural institutions of control through research, education, ethics, politics and government. What is required are on-line institutional processes for effectively translating emerging ecological risk assessments into economic incentives for feasible adaptations throughout the systems. Institutionalization of such on-line adaptive processes requires broad moral-ethical enlightenment and social-political commitment to make the emerging scientific, technological and economic dimensions productive (Faber et al., 1996). This paper presents on-line strategies of ecological risk assessment and control which are believed to be superior to alternatives that require a prior consensus on economic valuations of natural resource stocks, natural processes and environmental damages; and incentives have advantages over prescriptive regulations. When viewed in their greater economic context, the proposed strategies are formulated as coordinated institutions of on-line ecological and fiscal control processes on what is here defined as the ecological economies of corporate and political economies. The objective of the proposed control strategies is to pursue trajectories of joint ecological and cultural evolution toward systems that are ecologically and culturally both satisfying and sustainable. © 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.